Is "The Decline of the Humanities" like "The War on Christmas"?

As an old Humanities professor living with considerable pleasure in the modern world, reading my friends’ suggestions and recommended readings on Facebook and trawling Early English Books Online for research evidence, I am moved to express a few thoughts on the Decline of the Humanities.

            All the phenomena of budget cuts and preferential treatment for income-generating programs are of course real, and our first instinct is to regret them. But then, my first instinct is to regret seeing photographs of Stockholm filled with veiled Moslem women. First instincts sometimes need to be scrutinized, judged with care, and occasionally corrected.

            First of all, we need to be sure that our loudly-voiced regrets are untainted by concern for our own jobs, careers, and profession. I believe, for instance, that there are currently more people writing poetry than reading it; and I believe that there are more people who have profound knowledge of Edmund Spenser’s work than there are young people dying to have that knowledge communicated to them. This is disappointing for us, but the phenomenon will not go away, any more than cost-cutting administrators will go away. The case is altered.

            It began to be altered when ‘the profession’ professionalized itself following the 19^th-century German model, and the ideal book by a scholar was no longer something like Gilbert Highet’s Poets in a Landscape but something like A.E. Housman’s edition of Manilius. The process continued when those same monumental editions came to be frowned upon by tenure committees and replaced, as an ideal, by fashionable but largely unreadable articles and monographs with hundreds of endnotes, highly-specialized but blending, in an intellectually dubious way, knowledge and opinion, scholarship and criticism. The tenure committees themselves had much to do with the development, favoring as they did publication of such material and deprecating teaching and ‘popularizing’.

            Another alteration occurred in the 1960s, when political revolt unleashed a storm of opinion that considered apolitical scholarship as dangerously reactionary on the one hand and that brought an entire cultural generation to favor feeling over thought, on the other. One faction of the young (abetted by some of their elders) hounded politically-incorrect professors out of their lecture-rooms; another faction trusted no one over thirty and decided the past was bunk.

            A third alteration, a generation later, sprang from the invention of computers and all that followed therefrom: the Internet, Wikipedia, tablets, smartphones, and suchlike. What this did was to make unbelievable amounts of information available with unbelievable ease – at least to those who, or whose institutions, could afford the necessary hardware and software. It reminds me of my introduction to rock-climbing, and discovering that the nylon ropes, the sticky-soled clinging shoes and the curiously-shaped bits of metal that helped hold us to the rock made the whole process almost obscenely easy compared to the work of an older generation in hobnailed boots with hempen ropes and hammered pitons. This, of course, is still going on; and I am not sure most of us have really caught up with the informational universe in which our students live, move and have their being. It is a universe based, not only on an addiction to screens, but also on a new sense of what information is: no longer a hard-won treasure to add to a store of global insight informed by inherited or acquired values, but an environment at the same time limitlessly vast and easily accessible, where you pick what takes your fancy and discard it when it has served its purpose.

            The fourth and most recent alteration came with, and from, the Great Recession. This made an entire generation of educational administrators realize that much of their business was in essence a luxury trade flying under a democratic flag. As most of them now are products of the Sixties-to-Nineties generation themselves, they have no hard-wired interest in the humanities, and many feel (an older generation would have said “think”) that science and technology, especially in the service of ecology, are of far more use to humanity than classics, philosophy, and the works of Edmund Spenser. Also, their funds are running out. So they cut where they need to, and do not feel especially guilty.

            As in other areas of life, lateral thinking may help reorient us away from lamentation. The culture has changed, and it will not go back to what it was. What can and should ‘higher education’, and in particular what we call the Humanities, do in this new world? I offer a few suggestions.

1.     Literature, particularly literature of the past (and that includes Classics) is not really suited to the majority of current 18-year-olds. On the other hand, all of us have at some time taught mature students in their forties or older who have made sacrifices to come back to university and beg to be taught Shakespeare, Spenser, Ovid and Virgil. Accordingly, I suggest that Literature departments be reoriented toward mature students, and that 18-year-olds be admitted to them, but only on specific application.

2.     Plagiarism is everywhere, and authority is so over. The Humanities are no longer places for examinations and stern evaluation. Some kind of group research project may be a better way of judging how far students have progressed. The concept of a Degree may have to be re-thought, and in programs where real competence is required, Pass-Fail may usefully replace grade-inflated A-minuses, As and A-pluses.

3.     Much reading of, and learning about, History and Literature may in future be done in an adult and associative part-time context. Those guiding such discussion groups or clubs will be more like worker-priests than like Vatican theologians.

4.     It seems not unlikely that for future Humanities scholars, learning to write code and to create websites will be as important a part of their training as phonology, library science or the economics of Ancient Mesopotamia.

5.     There will, it seems to me, be need for far fewer full-time Humanities teachers. This is a situation we should look full in the face and for which we should prepare our profession and our institutions; for if we do not, our institutions will prepare for it without us. It might be useful to institute a numerus clausus in Doctoral programs, as happens in a number of countries with regard to medicine.

6.     We should work much more closely with high schools, with their teachers, and with secondary-education developers. It is at their level that students should learn that the past is not bunk and that history does not begin with World War II. We are, in a sense, the customers of their product; and we should loudly and unashamedly make our vision, and our needs, known to them.

7.     In the same way, we should work with grade-school teachers and curriculum developers. It is at that level that should, and must, be learnt the basic literacy too many of us still have to instil at freshman level. It is we who can help them overcome the last vestiges of the Sixties silliness that equates equality of opportunity with equality of performance.

These are just  few ideas that, to my mind, it is more worth while to pursue than lamentations over business-oriented administrators and semi-literate plagiarizing students. The case is altered, and we live in a whole new world.

FORGOTTEN POETRY: LAURIE LEE

Not many people remember Laurie Lee, and those who do probably connect his name with the novel Cider with Rosie. But his great love was poetry, and the other day I found a little volume of it, My Many-Coated Man, from the André Deutsch Paperback Poets series, on my bookshelves, and was struck by the quality of the work. Here is the title poem:

My Many-Coated Man

Under the scarlet-licking leaves,
through bloody thought and bubbly shade,
the padded, spicy tiger moves---
a sheath of swords, a hooded blade.

The turtle on the naked sand
peels to the air his pewter snout
and rubs the sky with slotted shell---
the heart's dismay turned inside out.

The rank red fox goes forth at night
to bite the gosling's downy throat, 
then digs his grave with panic claws
to share oblivion with the stoat.

The mottled moth, pinned to a tree,
woos with his wings the bark's disease
and strikes a fungoid, fevered pose
to live forgotten and at ease.

Like these, my many-coated man
shields his hot hunger from the wind,
and, hooded by a smile, commits
his private murder in the mind.

A EUROPEAN CALL TO ARMS

The following appeared in today's issue of the French daily 'La Croix'. It is a cry of alarm, and a call to action, from a MEP (Member of the European Parliament) who is also a lifelong activist, from his wilder days in the Sixties to his refusal to knuckle under to the supposedly inevitable even today: Daniel Cohn-Bendit. 

Americans tend either to believe that Europe is finished anyway, or that a United States of Europe is so obvious and simple that they can't see why Europeans don't just go and do it; but that is to reckon without 27 different languages and cultures. Imagine uniting in one political federal nation with Canada, Mexico, and Brazil . . . Anyway, this piece by Dany Cohn-Bendit (a deeply likeable and intelligent politician) struck me as worth translating and presenting here. 


‘THE SITUATION IS APPALLING BUT NOT IRREVERSIBLE’

We need Europe. And don’t think that this is simply a credo. For the first time in their history, the nation-states no longer have the capacity to resist the assaults of the economic sphere. They don’t admit it, but their leaders are no longer capable of keeping their promises. Common sense is enough to let us understand that individually they cannot manage to regulate the markets, control the financial sector, come to grips with climate worsening, or solve the social and economic crises.
Obviously, we didn’t get to this point by an act of God. The collective responsibility of the political leaders is well and truly involved. If only because they have not been able to gauge the degree to which globalization would destabilize things.  Occupied entirely by their ‘internal affairs’, they have not wanted to see the opportunity offered by the European dimension to enlarge their political sphere of action. The situation is appalling but not irreversible. As long as everyone begins by understanding that globalization forces us into a change of scale.
Thirty years from now, no state of the European Union will be part of the G8. The influence of France will be no greater than that of Luxemburg. From now on, if we want to conserve our civilization’s heritage, have our democracies progress, defend the ideas of social justice and protection, prevent our culture from being swept away by globalization, we will need to fight the battle at the European level. And a battle is exactly what it is. 
The accusations currently levelled at Europe are justified. Economic belt-tightening is no response to the recession: true. The criticism of the European Union’s faults and failures is right. But for heaven’s sake, let’s open our eyes! Believing in a national response is senseless. It’s only by way of Europe that we can remain in control of our lives. 
If, in France or elsewhere, a government follows a bad policy, the normal response is that either the policy must change or the government must. This is equally true for Europe. It’s not Europe that we should dump, but those who are making it. Don’t be fooled: it’s not re-nationing the European continent that will get us out of the mess. Don’t give up. That would guarantee our inability to act positively in the world. Europe has brought about an incredible progress of civilization. In this space which has produced atrocious wars and totalitarianisms, the very possibility of a war has been removed from the political imagination. That is an extraordinary achievement, but it is no longer enough.
  Open your eyes! Refuse a Europe of states left to a new war of economic powers. But for heaven’s sake don’t be trapped in the illusion of redemption by the Nation. 
See the battle for what it is: a struggle to the death between visions of Europe linked to diverging models of society and opposing conceptions of politics. 
It is evident that the European model of a Cameron is not that of a united Europe that bases its legitimacy upon a democratization of globalization, but rather that of a subversion of the European Union – and of the States – by the markets. His model of Europe is based on a conception of politics reduced to its simplest expression: to insure his re-election and to defend the interests of his City [of London]. Let’s not mistake the adversary: it is the failure of political will, alias the inaction of public power, that acts against the Europeans. 
We are in an unstable situation with an uncertain outcome. But we need to take it in hand because it will not ‘naturally’ move in the direction of a Europe set up for the 21st century and structured according to our common interest. Get rid of ‘there is no alternative’ [NB: in English]. Let us have the courage of a European federalism. We must create the United States of Europe, demand a serious European budget that allows us to intervene in the recession, to guarantee unemployment insurance for the young and a health-care system worthy of the name. Such a goal may seem unattainable. But take France. It looks back to the Revolution as its founding moment. And yet it took more than 150 years to give women the vote and to become a genuinely democratic republic. 
A political Europe that acts in the common interest in matters of economics, ecology, social development and education: there’s a utopia for this century. Get on with it, dissident Europe! 

HOUNDS OF SPRING

In the glory of a Southern French spring -- forsythias, fruit trees, hawthorn, entire fields full of daisies and dandelions, blackbirds, thrushes, doves and soon the nightingale -- someone sent me an e-mail asking me what I thought was the most euphonious word in English. I pondered "melancholy", "valerian", "singular" and others, but soon they were all crowded out of my mind by the most melodious piece of poetry I know in the English language:


WHEN the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
    The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
    With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
And the brown bright nightingale amorous         
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
    The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.

Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
    Maiden most perfect, lady of light,         
With a noise of winds and many rivers,
    With a clamor of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,         
    Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.

Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
    Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man’s heart were as fire and could spring to her,
    Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!         
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp-player;
For the risen stars and the fallen cling to her,
    And the southwest-wind and the west-wind sing.

For winter’s rains and ruins are over,         
    And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
    The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remember’d is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,         
And in green underwood and cover
    Blossom by blossom the spring begins.


Those of austere tastes consider this downright silly. But those of us who can still channel our 16-year-old romantic selves can even now murmur it in the glory of this season, and give thanks for poor tiny Algernon Swinburne, alcoholic, queer, masochist and word-freak.

FROM THATCH TO THATCHER: A FEW THOUGHTS

In the face of American media adulation and British vitriol, I’d like to offer a few scattered notes and a brief appreciation of Margaret Thatcher by someone uncomfortable with both.

In the first place, few people seem to want to remember how uniquely awful Britain was in the early Seventies. I’m interested in cars, and this was the decade when hidebound management and completely surrealist union practices together killed Europe’s greatest motor industry, so that today there is not one single genuine mass-market British marque left on British roads. It was a sign of the times, repeated in many areas.

Britain had emerged from the Swinging Sixties as the prime sufferer from the West’s hangover that began with the October 1973 Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis. Playtime was over; gloom set in, big-time. Moreover, it had got rid of its Empire precipitately, under international pressure, and found itself with no thanks from anyone and as many complications as before, if not more.

I do not know what Margaret Thatcher was thinking, but I’ve often speculated. Here is my theory. She looked at this hung-over society, headachy from the passing of the Beatles and Carnaby Street – which had never been more than a brief buzz – and incapable of going back to the sound if boring stability that preceded them: a society that had lost its decent bearings and was incapable of finding substitutes; a society that for want of better ideas was retreating into atavistic class-war clichés and trying hard to ignore the modern world.

Now, my theory is that she then looked at Hogarth.

Contemplating  Hogarth and Rowlandson (and perhaps Fielding) made her wonder where all that raw and riotous English energy had gone. Into timid gentrification? Into imitating the playing fields of Eton in the Hampstead Garden Suburb? Into sterile class-war gestures? Into worrying about national decline?

So she tried to bring it back; or rather, to let it out again, because (she was convinced) it had never gone away. And if that meant less politeness, less courtesy, less timidity, so be it. She wanted a pre-Victorian Britain back: a Britain that made the Duke of Wellington hope the enemy was as afraid of his troops as he was; a Britain that conquered the Plains of Abraham; a Britain that ruled half the planet, fairly if possible but energetically at all times.

She recognised that in the modern world, power has primarily to do with money. So unchaining power meant unchaining money. What the French call ‘la libéralisation’ ensued: she won a merciless battle with the all-powerful trade unions, and helped create Britain as a post-industrial, financial power.

In 1981, Argentina’s war on the Falklands allowed her a morally justified military operation that did much to restore British pride in the armed forces.

Of course, her ruthless modernization did away with much that denizens and lovers of an older Britain held dear. The sense of discretion, civility, quiet common sense, and stoicism in the face of adversity that used to characterise the country went by the board; and some Frenchmen found their old ‘frenemy’ returning to earlier ways. ‘Les Anglais sont des brutes épaisses (the English are gross brutes),’ a French friend remarked to me, not unpleased at seeing his ancient prejudices reconfirmed.  And in a remark that focused  much of the difference, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – the product of a far more aristocratic Scottish middle class -- murmured through his moustache, ‘The lady is selling the family silver.’

She was often referred to as a grocer’s daughter, the implication being that she had no gentility, no compassion and a middle-class mercantile disposition. Her patriotism also was a little strident, more Daily Mail than the old Thunderer.

She was a rival Queen, and her relations with the real Monarch were reputedly cool. But like the first Elizabeth, she manipulated her male courtiers with considerable talent, and at least one, Ian Gow, seems to have been her Christopher Hatton, genuinely in love with her until an IRA bomb murdered him.

She was what we would now call a Eurosceptic, realising that Britain would always have three spheres of activity none of which it could or should neglect: Europe, certainly, but also the Atlantic relationship with America, and the Commonwealth. Given that outlook, she had considerable influence outside Europe, notably in her friendship with President Reagan and in her encouragement of Mikhail Gorbachev.

In fairness, it should be said that much of what lovers of the older Britain regretted and regret had already been lost when she came to power. The Sixties changed the country’s culture far more radically than she did. The Seventies were a time of ruin, morosity, wildcat strikes everywhere and loathing. She picked the country up, shook it till its teeth rattled, kicked it in the seat of its pants, and set it on a new course. Richer but more vulgar; faster and more thrusting; more successful but more brutal.

I grew up in the older Britain, which I loved. But by 1974 that had disappeared, at least in public discourse. (In private it still lives on, in small towns and villages, at least wherever cottages do not have vast shiny BMWs parked outside.) My feelings toward the new Britain (now known as the You Kay) are ambiguous. As are those toward that strong, often harsh, often charming, intelligent woman. Her last pictures show the narrow, suspicious, angry eyes of Alzheimer’s, which I’ve seen close up in real life, and which I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Someone tweeted furiously, ‘Iron Lady, Rust in Peace.’ She did not initiate but completed the change in her country. She did a mighty if controversial job. She deserves her rest.

CHRISTOS ANESTI! ALETHEOS ANESTI!

WE CALL THIS FRIDAY GOOD

The Ruthwell Cross

On Good Friday, I often put up the relevant section of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. But this time it occurred to me to share the Anglo-Saxon "Dream of the Rood" attributed to Cynewulf. I found a translation by my old Oxford tutor in Old English, Richard Hamer, and reproduce it here, with belated thanks to that admirable guide. It looks a bit long, but is easy to read, and very powerful.

Hear while I tell about the best of dreams
Which came to me the middle of one night
While humankind were sleeping in their beds.

It was as though I saw a wondrous tree

Towering in the sky suffused with light,
Brightest of beams; and all that beacon was
Covered with gold. The corners of the earth
Gleamed with fair jewels, just as there were five
Upon the cross-beam. Many bands of angels,

Fair throughout all eternity, looked on.
No felon's gallows that, but holy spirits,
Mankind, and all this marvellous creation,
Gazed on the glorious tree of victory.
And I with sins was stained, wounded with guilt.

I saw the tree of glory brightly shine
In gorgeous clothing, all bedecked with gold.
The Ruler's tree was worthily adorned
With gems; yet I could see beyond that gold
The ancient strife of wretched men, when first

Upon its right side it began to bleed.

I was all moved with sorrows, and afraid
At the fair sight. I saw that lively beacon
Changing its clothes and hues; sometimes it was
Bedewed with blood and drenched with flowing gore,

At other times it was bedecked with treasure.
So I lay watching there the Saviour's tree,
Grieving in spirit for a long, long while,
Until I heard it utter sounds, the best
Of woods began to speak these words to me:

"It was long past - I still remember it -
That I was cut down at the copse's end,
Moved from my root. Strong enemies there took me,
Told me to hold aloft their criminals,
Made me a spectacle. Men carried me

Upon their shoulders, set me on a hill,
A host of enemies there fastened me.

And then I saw the Lord of all mankind
Hasten with eager zeal that He might mount
Upon me. I durst not against God's word

Bend down or break, when I saw tremble all
The surface of the earth. Although I might
Have struck down all the foes, yet stood I fast.

Then the young hero (who was God almighty)
Got ready, resolute and strong in heart.

He climbed onto the lofty gallows-tree,
Bold in the sight of many watching men,
When He intended to redeem mankind.
I trembled as the warrior embraced me.
But still I dared not bend down to the earth,

Fall to the ground. Upright I had to stand.

A rood I was raised up; and I held high
The noble King, the Lord of heaven above.
I dared not stoop. They pierced me with dark nails;
The scars can still be clearly seen on me,

The open wounds of malice. yet might I
Not harm them. They reviled us both together.
I was made wet all over with the blood
Which poured out from his side, after He had

Sent forth His spirit. And I underwent

Full many a dire experience on that hill.
I saw the God of hosts stretched grimly out.
Darkness covered the Ruler's corpse with clouds
His shining beauty; shadows passed across,
Black in the darkness. All creation wept,

Bewailed the King's death; Christ was on the cross.

And yet I saw men coming from afar,
Hastening to the Prince. I watched it all.
With sorrows I was grievously oppressed,
Yet willingly I bent to those men's hands,

Humbly. They took up there Almighty God,
And from the heavy torment lifted Him.
The soldiers left me standing drenched with moisture,
Wounded all over with the metal points.
They laid Him down limb-weary; then they stood

Beside the corpse's head, there they beheld
The Lord of heaven, and He rested there
A while, tired after the great agony.

The men then made a sepulchre for Him
In sight of me. They carved it of bright stone,

And set therein the Lord of victories.
Next, wretched in the eveningtide, they sang
A dirge for Him; and when they went away,
Weary from that great Prince, He stayed alone.

Yet we remained there weeping in our places

A good long time after the warriors' voices
Had passed away from us. The corpse grew cold,
The fair abode of life.

                                       Then men began
To cut us down. That was a dreadful fate.
In a deep pit they buried us. But friends

And servants of the Lord learnt where I was,
And decorated me with gold and silver.

Now you may understand, dear warrior,
That I have suffered deeds of wicked men
And grievous sorrows. Now the time has come

That far and wide on earth men honour me,
And all this great and glorious creation,
And to this beacon offers prayers. On me
The Son of God once suffered; therefore now
I tower mighty underneath the heavens,

And I may heal all those in awe of me.

Once I became the cruellest of tortures,
Most hateful to all nations, till the time
I opened the right way of life for men.
So then the prince of glory honoured me,

And heaven's King exalted me above
All other trees, just as Almighty God
Raised up His mother Mary for all men
Above all other women in the world.

Now, my dear warrior, I order you

That you reveal this vision to mankind,
Declare in words this is the tree of glory
On which Almighty God once suffered torments
For mankind's many sins, and for the deeds
Of Adam long ago. He tasted death

Thereon; and yet the Lord arose again
By his great might to come to human aid.
He rose to heaven.

                                  And the Lord Himself,
Almighty God and all His angels with Him,
Will come onto this earth again to seek

Mankind on Doomsday, when the final Judge
Will give His verdict upon every man,
What in this fleeting life he shall have earned.
Nor then may any man be without fear
About the words the Lord shall say to him.

Before all He shall ask where that man is
Who for God's name would suffer bitter death
As formerly He did upon the cross.
Then they will be afraid, and few will know
What they may say to Christ. But there need none

Be fearful if he bears upon his breast
The best of tokens. Through the cross each soul
Nay journey to the heavens from this earth,
Who with the Ruler thinks to go and dwell."

I prayed then to the cross with joyous heart

And eagerness, where I was all alone,
Companionless; my spirit was inspired
With keenness for departure; and I spent
Much time in longing. Now my hope of life
Is that I may approach the tree of triumph

Alone more often than all other men,
Honour it well; my wish for that is great
Within my heart, and my hope for support
Is turned towards the cross. I have on earth
Not many noble friends, but they have gone

Hence from earth's joys and sought the King of glory.
With the High father now they live in heaven
And dwell in glory; and I wait each day
For when the cross of God, which here on earth
I formerly beheld, may fetch me from

This transitory life and carry me
To where there is great bliss and joy in heaven,
Where the Lord's host is seated at the feast,
And it shall set me where I afterwards
may dwell in glory, live in lasting bliss

Among the saints.

                                  May God be friend to me,
He who once suffered on the gallows tree
On earth here for men's sins. Us He redeemed
And granted us our life and heavenly home.

Hope was renewed with glory and with bliss

For those who suffered burning fires in hell.
The Son was mighty on that expedition,
Successful and victorious; and when
The one Almighty Ruler brought with Him
A multitude of spirits to God's kingdom,

To bliss among the angels and the souls
Of all who dwelt already in the heavens
In glory, then Almighty God had come,
The Ruler entered into His own land. 

The Vercelli Codex, fol. 104v